


On the Edge

by rogueshadows



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Aftermath - Chuck Wendig, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Force Sensitive!Cobb Vanth, Force Sensitivity (Star Wars), Gen, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:46:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28585191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rogueshadows/pseuds/rogueshadows
Summary: His parents had called his intuition a gift, back when they still knew him, and now Cobb has to wonder if there’s more to it than that.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Cobb Vanth
Comments: 12
Kudos: 79





	On the Edge

**Author's Note:**

> Force-Sensitive Cobb Vanth musings inspired by a prompt list I saw on tumblr. Thanks to ANTchan for looking this over!

With the last of the Red Key gang run out of town, the quiet surrounding Mos Pelgo finally loses some of its charge. Cobb knows better than to be lulled by it so easily, even with every sign insisting things have settled. He keeps the armor and wonders if it might be enough, if maybe, he could settle too. He’d hoped the same thing the first time, when he’d taken up work in the mine, before he became the galaxy's most unlikely hero to the humble folks who live there. He’d relieved the place and its people from a whole new hell after the Empire fell, on dumb luck and impulse more than any reasonable tact or talent. Without the armor, he never could have come back to face it, never could have survived a single shot blasted his way. It’s a fact he finds himself relaying time and time again in the face of the compliments he can’t quite carry.

It’s after another such compliment, one accompanied with a free drink that turned into three, that Cobb finds himself caught up in a familiar feeling that has him begging off. Smiling through it, he finds the focus to clap his new acquaintance on the back before he goes, unwilling to cause any strife after all the people of this town have been through. To them, he’s nothing but a ray of light, cocky and handy with a blaster, someone they can trust to have their back without the slightest idea of all that’s gotten him this far.

For all that their kind smiles and words warm him, Cobb retreats to the back of the cantina all the same. He unlocks the door to his newfound home with a swift move of fingers over the keypad, still taking up space in the small room the bartender had all but insisted he take as his own, attempting to grasp an honest justification for his good fortune. Cobb’s life hasn’t been all clean, and his heart has beat on far from pure, but still, he lives where others have fallen, breathing dusty air and surviving more than he ever dared to hope for. 

The storm Cobb had somehow managed to pacify with the raiders was hardly the half of it, his hands still constantly at a ready quiver, in tune with something more. There was an edge to the galaxy that revealed itself at times, the blade skirting past him without cutting, just so long as he remembered it was there. His parents had called his intuition a gift, back when they still knew him, and now he has to wonder if there’s more to it than that. Cobb looks to the armor in the quiet as he peels the pieces away, to the calluses of his hands from years spent fighting his way out of tough situations, and wonders if the signs that lead him here had been misguided to continue entrusting him with so much.

It’s further complicated, as it always seems to be, when Cobb shuts his eyes. He sees the shine of a helmet, like his own and not at all, the face beneath it is nothing but a blur, hands covered in leather gloves taking his own before the whole vision fades. Kriff, he hates when these things are so inscrutable, like trying to make things out through a broken pair of quadnocs. He might account such imaginings to the spotchka, or he might not. On a given night he had his fair share of them, turning over from dreams into reality as the facades of Mos Pelgo once had, years before he’d ever see the place in person. 

Just as he had in his teenage years, boarding a slaver’s skiff to shift his mother’s fate; as a man shooting another point-blank; and even just months ago, picking up a camtono and carrying it past reason on nothing more than a feeling, Cobb knows there is nothing to do but keep living and wait.

\---

It’s not until years later when a man strides into his town, wrapped in beskar and shining like an idol, that Cobb realizes what he was waiting for.


End file.
